The first report is always wrong
[TW: violence against minorities, including suicide.]
The evidence against Michael Jackson-Bolanos is circumstantial: digital fingerprints place him near the scene. He admits to “fumbling with cars” nearby, but insists he didn’t kill Samantha Woll.
Remember Samantha? A Jewish leader from Michigan, she was stabbed to death in her home last October. There were no suspects. No leads. No motive.
Jewish communities grieved. Glancing nervously behind us, we adjusted routes. Exhausted, we startled awake at 1:24 a.m. Police asserted it wasn’t a hate crime — we should relax. We didn’t. How could they know that, without a suspect?
An old friend warned me against imagining persecution.
Months later, a Black man with a history of petty theft was arraigned for murder on circumstantial evidence so inconsistent the judge called it “peculiar.”[1] If this too-familiar story of hanging the nearest Black man holds up in court, my friend will be vindicated: it wasn’t a hate crime.
This time.
It isn’t just Jews, of course. Every group on the margins of acceptability faces this cycle of minimization. It repeats like seasonal monsoons every time a Black man is shot by police: cops waggle suggestive eyebrows in the direction of pending toxicology reports, or dredge up a colourful history. Reporters dutifully parrot unconfirmed police speculation. Social media lights up with debate over the victim’s last actions, relative innocence, and questionable moral fiber. Devastated members of the victim’s community are gaslit before they can breath again.
Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor…
Wait, I’m sorry — today I’m writing about the murder of Nex Benedict, a gender non-conforming teen who died the day after his [2 - The Advocate] head was slammed repeatedly into the toilet floor in an Oklahoma school’s girls’ bathroom. Oklahoma, a state with a failing grade for protecting its gender non-conforming residents[3], requires students to use bathrooms assigned to the gender on their birth certificate.
Nex did, and was brutally beaten for following the law.
Oklahoma police then launched a script routinized into ambient invisibility. Friends who are transgender, or who love transgender kids, now exhibit symptoms so familiar I can taste them in the back of my throat. They can’t talk about it. They can’t stop talking about it. They’re afraid to go out. They can’t sleep. They can’t focus. They’re angry. They feel alone, abandoned and vulnerable. They’ve slipped into depression. They’re impotent with blind rage, knowing even allies will move on before “the facts are established.” Demands that they not “jump to conclusions” leave them feeling gaslit.
Which conclusions? Nex was bullied for months, in a state that intentionally made bathroom access a political flashpoint. Nex was using the girl’s bathroom, as required by state law. Nex’s head was bashed into the toilet floor repeatedly. These are not conclusions. These are credibly reported facts.
For years, transgender activists beseeched us to recognize the grim inevitability of exactly this outcome. They’ve begged, pleaded, cried, and screamed for our attention. Nex posed no risk, neither in actuality nor in the perverse fantasies of conservatives driving bathroom controversy. He was in the bathroom they insisted he use.
In the aftermath of Nex’s death, we’re watching the whole, tired pageant play out. Oklahoma police announced, falsely, that the coroner had ruled out head trauma as cause of death. They deflected suggestively toward a tox screen, which may take weeks. They released his mother’s 9-1-1 call, misgendering Nex in her panic and grief as her child died in front of her. They plagiarized the school district’s self-serving, reflexive public relations posturing. Police had even offered legal advice, informing Nex he’d started the fight by squirting water.
Here’s what a conclusion might look like: Nex was killed because our transgender children are pawns in a vicious, hypocritical scrabble for power. Nex threatened no one. He followed the rules. He only wanted to grow up safely.
That his death resulted from the beating is the simplest assumption.
Despite this, armchair quarterbacks and self-styled pathologists across the country were already squabbling over details of the walked-back police statement before Nex’s beleagured community stopped sobbing. Before Nex’s body was buried. Before his pronouns were clarified.[2]
The first report is always wrong, but anything’s possible, right? Samantha Woll could have been murdered by a petty burglar who escalated from jiggling car doors to stabbing her in the head and neck eight times, while picking up just one, faintly perceptible trace of blood on his cuff. It’s not impossible that Nex died of causes totally unrelated to the assault he suffered on his last full day of life. Maybe Putin poisoned him.
Still, it is not we, the abused, who need to wait for “all the facts” to emerge. These events — the mocking, the beatings, the killings — exacerbate our fears precisely because they align with the real, actualized threats society insists we’re overstating. Every transgender person has struggled with the question of where to pee. Every Black man has sweated through a traffic stop. Every Jewish family has stories about the last time the pogroms started.
Every non-dominant community suffers the constant, monotonous, infuriating minimization of the evil that hunts and kills us. Our interogators demand courtroom-ready evidence for every complaint, and dismissal is the default.
From the first hasty press release defending the school system, police response, or local culture, this minimization infects everyone else’s viewpoint. The school district that dozens of students claim routinely ignores bullying and the police tasked not to protect transgender Oklahomans from discrimination: they provide that first, unsworn report we agree to deem credible.
Some of you think I’m being hyperbolic. I’ll bet Nex heard that, too.
The hulking rage, immobilizing fear, and sulking resentment that minorities experience when faced with yet another slaughter of one of our members does not stand by quietly waiting for facts that may never emerge. Our reactions are visceral and raw, even when we shutter them from your view. We aren’t overreacting whether or not this particular event turns out to be an example of what we fear. These reactions are rational responses to a world that persistantly insists we don’t really experience the things we certainly do experience.
Why would we assume a police spokesman is credible? The first report is always wrong — and it usually points the finger at us.
If, in any particular case, it turns out that our fears were misplaced, why is it important to grind our noses into evidence that we flinched at shadows, this time? Any time we react to an event with blind rage, abject fear, or paralyzing grief, we stand discredited. Does it soothe your guilt to imagine our hypervigilance is merely community-wide paranoia, unearned? Why must we, cringing reflexively after generations of patronizing minimization, control our reactions while you hail dismissive first reports as “evidence?”
We are tasked with patiently waiting for proof beyond a reasonable doubt, while around us rages a maelstrom of speculation, challenging our very humanity.
If your transgender friends won’t show you their pain, do you really have transgender friends? Brutal violence rocks minority communities to the core. It is our job to hold such systemic turmoil gently. We owe our friends compassion for diverse, overwhelming reactions we are not personally suffering (not this time, anyway).
Nex Benedict should be alive today. Transphobia tortured him while alive, and contributed to his brutal death. That’s true no matter the coroner’s result. The strain of surviving bigotry contributes to every poor health outcome imaginable: heart disease, diabetes, stroke, suicide, addiction... It’s all correlated with oppression.[4]
Every transgender person you know is currently experiencing elevated stress, and we’re contributing to it with every condescending reassurance. Violence against transgender people is an epidemic.[5] The fear, rage, grief and resentment triggered by Nex’s death is rational.
That’s a conclusion and a fact.
[1] https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2024/01/24/samantha-woll-killing-5-things-we-learned-in-two-day-court-hearing/72330727007/
[2] https://www.advocate.com/news/nex-benedict-transgender-vigil-friends
[3] https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality_maps/profile_state/OK
[4] https://www.apa.org/topics/racism-bias-discrimination/health-disparities-stress
[5] https://reports.hrc.org/an-epidemic-of-violence-2022